Deep Cover

by Rachel Butler

  Damon locked himself in the bathroom, then pulled out the phone and checked the battery level. It was getting dangerously low, and every damn call he’d made to J.T. that week that had gone unanswered had drained more of its power. This was likely the last call he’d be able to make before it went dead. The fucker had damn well better pick up this time.

  He dialed the number, then lifted the phone to his ear. The phone rang once, then went silent. Grinding his jaw, he lowered it and saw the screen had gone dark. It was dead. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!” He slammed the phone against the countertop, breaking it into two pieces, then threw both into the sink.

  “Hey, what are you doing in there?” the guard yelled.

  Breathing deeply, Damon stuffed the pieces back into his pocket, flushed the toilet, then walked out and down the hall to the living room. “I was looking for more paper under the sink and knocked a can of sanitizing shit over.”

  What the hell did it matter who or what Robinette really was? he decided as he dropped into the easy chair, propped his feet on the coffee table, and used the remote to turn on the television. So he’d delayed his escape for a few days to find out information that he wasn’t going to get. It hadn’t been a total loss. He had an extra mil in his account. That counted for a lot.

  He intended to enjoy every freakin’ dollar of it.

  Starting the next day.

  17

  November 18. I’m going to Jamaica next week. My man down there has been watching the girl for weeks. He knows her routine as well as I know my own. My first job will be to gain her trust, and I have a plan to do just that. What better way to gain a child’s loyalty and faith than by rescuing her from a fate worse than death? The private detective knows a man—a liar, a thief, a con artist who fouls the very air he breathes. He’ll do anything for money, including attack a young girl. I’ve warned the detective that she’s not to be seriously harmed, though some pain is good. It makes the experience even more frightening, the rescue even more welcome. When I save her from this filthy lech, when I offer her my protection, she’ll be so grateful. When she sees that I’m willing to kill for her—a stranger! when her own parents couldn’t care whether she lives or dies—she’ll be mine, heart and soul.

  The journal fell from Selena’s trembling hands. Leaving it on the bed, she surged to her feet and from the room. The others had gone their separate ways after dinner. She headed upstairs, turning on all the lights in the ballroom, going to her easel. She squeezed out paints on the palette, but when it came time to pick up the brush, her fingers froze. She couldn’t curl them around the smooth handle, couldn’t envision touching the bristles to canvas, not in her current mood.

  Frustrated, she moved to the center of the floor, planted her feet wide, and bent in a long, slow stretch. Yoga was a great stress reducer, but she couldn’t think about movements, postures, or breathing. All she could think about was William.

  He hadn’t killed her attacker in that alley to save her life.

  He’d paid him to attack her in the first place, had even instructed him how badly to hurt her, then had murdered him to earn her devotion—and keep his secret.

  She’d thought he was her rescuer, her savior, when he’d been nothing but a cold-blooded, calculating murderer. There had never been anything good or honorable or decent about their relationship.

  Never.

  Muttering a curse, she straightened and eyed the treadmill across the room. A run sounded tempting. She could run far enough, fast enough, to exhaust her mind as well as her body. She could forget, at least for a time, just how vile a man her father figure, this man she’d loved, had truly been.

  A time wasn’t long enough, though. The knowledge would come back. She would have to deal with it.

  And the best way to do that was with Tony. She was on her way back to her room to call him when headlights at the gate caught her attention. She peered out the window at the end of the hall and, with a rush of gratitude, recognized his Impala. She didn’t rush down the stairs to greet him, though, but went to her room, picked up the journal she was coming to hate, and stuffed it beneath the clothing in a dresser drawer, then sat down to wait for Gentry to call her or for Tony to knock at the door.

  Minute after minute passed with no intercom call, no knock. Maybe, she admitted, he hadn’t come to see her but had had news to share with the FBI. But the only interest he had in common with them was her, and she didn’t like being left out of conversations about her.

  She headed downstairs, hearing voices from the gentlemen’s parlor before she reached the halfway point—Robinette’s, quiet and steely, and a woman’s, her soft Southern accent distorted by emotion. So Tony had found Kathryn Hamilton. Selena wasn’t surprised. One of the things William had hated most about him, besides his morality, was his doggedness. He never gave up—lucky for her.

  She stopped in the parlor doorway. Robinette was closest to her, frustration on his face. Gentry was leaning against a windowsill on the far side of the room, Tony was near the fireplace, and Jamieson stood in the space formed by the sofa and two wing chairs, next to Kathryn Hamilton. She looked disheveled, her clothes rumpled, her makeup smeared around the eyes, her hair flat in places where it shouldn’t have been. Even so, she still managed to look elegant next to Jamieson’s jeans, T-shirt, and the gun on his hip.

  Gentry was the first to notice Selena. She gestured to Robinette, who stopped midsentence to scowl at her. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Joining the crowd. Someone must have forgotten to invite me.”

  Tony wore a frown that matched Robinette’s. “You don’t need to be here,” he said, his steely tone matching, as well.

  “Are you going to tell me that this doesn’t concern me? The woman tried to hire someone to kill me. It concerns me more than any of you.”

  Kathryn took a step forward, but stopped when Jamieson touched her arm. She settled instead for wringing her hands with their flashy diamonds. “Oh, Selena, I’ve been asking to speak to you, but they refused. I am so sorry. I can’t even begin to tell you . . . I don’t know what happened. It was just— just—”

  “A moment of insanity?” Tony’s dry tone suggested he’d heard the phrase more than once that evening.

  “Absolutely. Surely you understand, Selena. When Henry brought you here to kill Tony, you agreed, even though you didn’t intend to actually do it. I did contact that man and offer him money—because I’d snapped. But I never intended to go through with it. You, of all people, have to understand.”

  Selena did understand, in theory. And if it was anyone besides William’s sister, she would probably believe her. But people like Kathryn Hamilton didn’t just snap. She’d known what she was doing, and she’d fully intended to carry it through, until the prospect of getting caught had made her think better of her actions.

  “What would killing me have accomplished? William would still be in a coma. He would still be nothing but a common criminal. Nothing would have changed.” Except that Kathryn would have had the satisfaction of knowing that she’d removed Selena from William’s world.

  With a glance at Jamieson, daring him to touch her again, Kathryn moved, putting a few inches between them. “You’re right, of course. It wouldn’t have accomplished a thing. I know that now, but at the time I wasn’t thinking rationally. I thought it would fix everything. I thought it would turn Henry back into the brother I’ve always adored and make all this ugly mess go away . . . but I was wrong. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Selena glanced at Tony, who was still scowling, then at Robinette. Neither of them was buying the remorse. Truthfully, she had doubts as well. It wasn’t as if she and Kathryn had any sort of friendship. They were strangers whose only connection was through William. If not for him, they never would have met; having met, odds were slim that they ever would have seen each other again. What could forgiveness possibly matter?

  She moved a few steps farther into the room, in Tony’s direction. “Everyone makes
mistakes,” she said with a casual-ness she was far from feeling.

  “How gracious of you to understand.” Kathryn’s smile was bright and warm, to match the look in her eyes as she calmly pulled Jamieson’s pistol from the holster on his belt, pointed it at Selena, and pulled the trigger.

  Tony shoved Selena to the floor, landing on top of her an instant before the bullet splintered the fireplace marble. A second deafening shot sounded, tearing into the wall, sending plaster dust into the air, and overwhelming the sounds of a scuffle, followed an instant later by relative calm.

  After a moment, Robinette’s feet appeared in the few inches of space Selena could see around Tony. “Are you all right?”

  Tony rolled off her, sat up, then helped her to her feet. Rubbing her shoulder where she’d hit the floor, she nodded, then made eye contact with Kathryn, who was being restrained by Jamieson and Gentry, and shivered. William had looked at her like that once, just before he’d tried to kill her.

  “I should have killed you the first time I ever saw you,” Kathryn spat out. “You were so tiny, so innocent, and I hated you then. I despised you. But, no, Henry wouldn’t let me. He said he would do it. Goddamned liar. You brought us nothing but trouble. Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any idea how much you’ve cost us? Henry’s life, my marriage, my life. You’re nothing, nobody. You don’t even deserve to breathe the same air we do. If there’s a God in heaven, he’ll strike you down. He’ll make you pay, he’ll—”

  In the hall, the front door slammed, then a man’s voice shouted, “Kathryn! My God, were those gunshots I heard? Where are you?”

  Horror spread across her face and she swayed unsteadily on her feet. “Oh, dear God, no,” she whispered, then her voice rose to a wail. “Noo! This isn’t fair! Not now, not after all these years . . .” Her face screwed into a look of pure hatred as she lunged toward Selena. The two agents dragged her back, restrained her, but that didn’t lessen her struggle. “This is all your fault! I’ll kill you, I swear to God, I’ll kill you!”

  The man burst into the room with Frank Simmons on his heels, looking around frantically until his gaze locked on Kathryn. Relief washed over the stranger’s face in the moment before he noticed the handcuffs Robinette was using to secure her wrists behind her back. “Kathryn, what’s going on? What have you done?”

  Tearfully she tried to move toward him, but couldn’t. “I did it for you, Grant, for us. I just tried to make things right,” she whimpered. “I love you so much, and I just wanted everything to be right between us. I just wanted . . .”

  “What are you talking about? What have you done? Someone tell me what’s going on here.” His gaze swept around the room as he sought someone in authority, skimming over Selena, then abruptly jerking back. He paled and raised one hand to his chest as if in pain, and the steps he took in her direction were unsteady. When Simmons stopped him with a hand on his arm, he looked grateful for the support. “Amelia,” he whispered, and Kathryn crumpled with big, heartrending sobs.

  “Get her out of here,” Robinette ordered, and the two agents half dragged, half carried her from the room. Her anguish grew fainter the farther they went. “Mr. Hamilton, I presume.”

  Had they been expecting him? Selena wondered. Tony had picked up Kathryn, Simmons had picked up her husband, and the feds had invited them all to a nice little talk about her. Only she had been left out.

  The man spared him a brief glance before returning his stare to Selena. “Yes, I’m Kathryn’s husband,” he murmured, then directed a question to Selena. “Who are you?”

  She glanced at Tony, who slid his arm around her waist as she drew a breath. “Selena McCaffrey.”

  A look of exquisite sorrow crossed Grant’s face as he shook his head. “Not Amelia. Of course. Where is she? Is she all right?”

  “I—I don’t know anyone named Amelia. Who is she?”

  “Your mother.” His voice was soft, distant, raw with hurt. “She was twenty-six when you were born. You look exactly like her.”

  Selena wrapped her fingers tightly around Tony’s. Her knees had grown unsteady, and a knot was loosening, then tightening, in her stomach. She wet her lips, opened her mouth, but had to search to find her voice. “How—how do you know my mother?”

  He took another step toward her, and Simmons let him, and he said the words she’d thought she would never hear. “Because I’m your father.”

  Until the past few days, Selena had long carried an image of her father—black, loving, honorable, responsible, with a large family who would welcome her into their midst. She’d never considered whether he was rich, middle-class, or poor, educated or ignorant, a professional or a janitor or a subsistence farmer. None of that had mattered.

  But she’d never imagined a wealthy, white, Old South, plantation-owning, descendant-of-slave-holders lawyer— and William’s brother-in-law, to boot.

  Simmons had taken Kathryn to jail, and Robinette, Jamieson, and Gentry had politely moved elsewhere in the house, leaving Selena, Tony, and Grant Hamilton alone in the parlor.

  She looked at Grant—at her father—and her fingers clenched around Tony’s. He was probably close to sixty, under six feet, and soft around the middle. His brown hair, streaked with gray, was thinning on top, and he wore glasses that gave him an owlish look. He was handsome enough, but there was a weariness, a sense of loss, ingrained in every line of his face.

  She opened her mouth, couldn’t think of anything to say, then closed it again. She’d always thought she would have a million questions, curiosities, pleas, if she ever met her father, but not one came to mind at the moment.

  “You seem fairly certain that Selena is your daughter,” Tony said. “Why?”

  Grant stared at her a moment before tearing his gaze away and smiling faintly. “If you’d ever seen Amelia, you’d be certain, too.”

  Kathryn had been, Selena thought, certain enough to try to kill her. And Henry had been certain enough to take her in.

  “The resemblance couldn’t be stronger if they were identical twins,” Grant went on. “I’d be happy to submit to DNA testing for you, but I don’t need the proof. I know.”

  “Obviously you haven’t seen Amelia or Selena in a long time. What happened?”

  “The name we gave you was Amalia,” Grant said, and Selena stiffened. “It was my idea. Amelia wanted to name you after her mother, but I wanted to name you after your own mother. She didn’t like the nicknames that came to mind— Big Amelia and Little Amelia, Old Amelia and Young Amelia—so we settled on Amalia. It was close enough.”

  “That’s what the family who raised me until I was nine called me,” Selena murmured.

  Again he stared at her, as if he couldn’t believe she was real. After a time, he shook his head, drew a breath, and repeated, “What happened . . . Kathryn happened.” With a hopeless shrug, he explained. “I’m a lawyer. I met Amelia thirty years ago, when I handled her mother’s will. No woman had ever attracted me the way she did. She was beautiful, kind, warm, loving, generous, sweet.”

  In short, everything his wife wasn’t.

  “We tried to ignore the feelings between us. I was married, she was black, I was white, it was Alabama . . . but every time I saw her, around town, in court, in the store where she worked, it got harder and harder until . . . we began an affair. We fell in love, and she got pregnant. I wanted to divorce Kathryn and go away with Amelia, to someplace where no one knew us, where it wouldn’t be quite so hard for us or our baby, but she was reluctant. Alabama was her home, her family was there, her roots were there.”

  He rose from the chair and walked to the fireplace, running his finger over the hole in the marble from the first gunshot. “She finally agreed to leave soon after you were born. I began shutting down my practice, and I . . . I told Kathryn. She wasn’t surprised that I’d had an affair. She was willing to forgive me and even to make financial arrangements for the child. But she couldn’t handle the fact that I wanted a divorce. She became hysterica
l, making threats—against me. Not you or Amelia. Two days later I went to Amelia’s house, and the car was gone, your clothes were gone . . . you were gone. I searched for years, but never found so much as a clue.”

  “Didn’t you wonder if Kathryn had done something?” Tony asked quietly.

  Grant flinched at the obvious implication of the question. I should have killed you the first time I saw you, Kathryn had said, but her brother wouldn’t let her. A shiver ran through Selena. William had been involved in whatever incident had erased her and her mother from Grant’s life. Had he killed her mother? Had Kathryn?

  “Kathryn admitted that she’d gone to talk to Amelia,” Grant went on, “to make her see reason. She said she offered her $10,000 to take the baby and leave without seeing me again, and that Amelia accepted. I didn’t believe her, not even after seeing the withdrawal from the bank. Amelia wouldn’t have left, not unless she was threatened, not unless she had no other choice.”

  Dying certainly would have left her no other choice.

  Apparently, the same thought occurred to Grant, because that sorrowful look returned. “I’d always hoped she had taken the money, that the two of you were alive and well and happy someplace else. I could accept that she’d stopped loving me, or that she hadn’t loved me enough to stand up to Kathryn, but I couldn’t bear the idea that she was . . . was . . .”

  Dead. The word hung between them as surely as if a thousand voices had intoned it.

  “But she never would have let you go. You were her life. She loved you more than anything. The only way anyone could have taken you from her was if she was dead.” His shoulders rounded.

  The look on his face was so powerful that Selena had to avert her gaze. Instead she looked at Tony’s hands, holding hers, so strong and gentle and steady. She leaned against him, grateful he was there, as he’d promised he always would be.

  The silence was broken by the jarring ring of Tony’s cell phone. He murmured an apology, let go of Selena, and moved toward the door. After speaking for only a moment, he hung up and gestured for her to join him. “Garry got a search warrant for Mrs. Hamilton’s rooms. He’s going to the hotel, and he wants me to check the bed-and-breakfast. Are you okay?”